Gil Melle

The Andromeda Strain (1971) ...

American jazz musician Gil Melle composed this electronic soundtrack for sci-fi classic movie The Andromeda Strain ...

The Andromeda Strain ... 

'His score for The Andromeda Strain is by turns haunting and gnarly, and it sounds right at home in the 21st century, whether alongside the similarly handmade malevolence of Wolf Eyes or the drugged dronescapes of Tim Hecker. For the film, Mellé built his own electronic studio on the Universal lot and a slew of one-of-a-kind electronic devices. He re-processed the recorded sounds of buzzsaws, bowling alleys, and orchestral instruments for the film, creating a remarkable score that anticipates future electronic music. Mellé captures the sound of booping radar, red light-triggered epileptic seizures, satellite transmissions, weather pattern feedback, scanning microscope whirrs, and mutating super-germs. The ever-pressurizing pulses and oscillations only heighten the film’s biological warfare anxieties and–much like the noisy music itself–such fear continues to riddle us in the present... idolator.com ...

 All records should be polygons ...

 Regardless of the debunked myths of "firsts" that Melle claimed, his soundtrack takes all the elements of primitive electronic music and approaches them in a compositional way, rather than through the more random applications from which most users of Moogs and ARP Odysseys got their sounds at the turn of the decade. For non-organic sounds, Melle makes his cascades of beeps, ticks, swishes, and so on come alive, building in tension and even rhythmic counterpoint. He sets the tone well with each piece, and there's a great flow and logic - and even musicality - to the otherworldly sounds he's able to coax from his homespun collection of cables. Sadly the sountrack itself - which must've taken a long time to create - is super short, clocking in at under 1/3 the length of the actual movie, a brief and disappointing 26 minutes... listofthelost.blogspot.co.uk ...